Ello

Babette was "typing" on the my laptop today, as is her wont (like Mommy, like Babette), and several times she had to ask me to get rid of a little pop-up menu for letters with diacritical marks. Eventually I got curious and tried to bring up the menus myself -- option+letter, nope... control+letter, nope... I was mystified, because I've watched her type, and she doesn't usually go beyond the letter and punctuation keys.

So after I failed to get the menus, I had the bright idea of asking her if she knew how she was doing it. She nodded. Great! "Okay, show me how," I said. She pointed to a letter. I was disappointed. She certainly wasn't doing it just by typing the letter by itself. But I said, "Well, go ahead." So she pressed a key -- and held it. Voila! There was the menu! For the next 45 minutes, she tried out all the letters to find out which came with menus, and I watched in amazement.